What does it mean to be human?

By:Devyn Blandford

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

For newly minted college students, freshman year is a time of exploration – full of interesting classes, events, and people. For students in the Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Experience (ASURE), there is an additional sense of excitement. While deep in fall coursework along with the rest of their cohort, these students are doing something freshmen rarely do: diving into the rigors of research.

ASURE students Lucas Henson and Zoe Swayne are students in Professor Laura Foster’s course “Critical Approaches to the Arts and Humanities: Exploring Science and Humanity,” and through their classroom experience Lucas and Zoe are discovering what humanities research truly entails.

Professor Foster, an associate professor of gender studies, designed her course to teach students to see the world as a construct, and the world of science is no exception. She encourages students to interrogate how narratives are created in scientific work and to think about social problems from both scientific and humanistic perspectives.

Much of the thinking and learning in Foster’s course centers on what might seem at first to be a rather insignificant object: a small succulent plant named Hoodia gordonii, found in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa. But the history of human interaction with Hoodia, from medicinal herb used by the local Sān people to profitable appetite suppressant in the Western diet industry, dramatically illustrates the legal, racial, scientific, and commercial complexities involved in the plant’s story. Foster’s recent publication, Reinventing Hoodia: Peoples, Plants, and Patents in South Africa, serves as a case study for the class.

Swayne, who is double majoring in biology and psychology, says that her ideas of what research is and the processes it involves have been totally transformed by Foster’s class:

I didn’t realize how much reading and how much background knowledge you have to have before you go into a subject. It’s like doing the research before the research.

According to Henson, a philosophy major, he and his fellow ASURE students are learning skills that they can take with them throughout their studies and beyond. “Professor Foster wants us to learn to read for research. She said that a lot of people don’t know how to read for college and that’s actually a good point.”

In Foster’s course, “reading” means learning how to engage with the material critically. “You’re not reading it for the facts,” Swayne says, “you’re reading it to decide whether you accept or reject the information that’s being presented to you. I’m not reading to take everything at face value. I’m reading to look underneath the surface. Learning how to do that and how to understand what’s in a scientific paper is a lot more than I thought.”

Henson feels that his ideas about the nature of science itself have evolved: “Science is not really that objective, and it says whatever society wants it to say at times.” Through extensive reading and concept mapping, he has been able to make critical connections between the ideas he encounters in C-103 and the rest of his classes: “I’ve already drawn connections and you start to see the world differently. You start looking at a topic and you think, ‘That’s how I think about it – how would this person think about it?’”

Direct Admit Lucas Henson is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Experience (ASURE).

In the spring semester, ASURE students will advance to Discovery Labs that offer hands-on guidance from professors as they put what they’ve learned into practice. They will make their own discoveries and creations and develop new knowledge, using skills from their first-semester class. The labs focus on topics such as podcasting and rhetoric, the integration of digital skills and narrative storytelling, and the relationship between mind and body through puzzles.

Freshman year is a time of change, and for ASURE students like Henson and Swayne, learning essential research and critical thinking skills allows them to navigate and reflect on those changes from a myriad of perspectives. Their goals vary and their paths will take them far from IU, but with their skills in humanities research to guide them, they may never take the world at face value again.